Arts & Entertainment

Author Andrew Lam to Read Friday at Laguna Beach Books

Submitted by Laguna Beach Books:

On Friday, June 14 at 6 pm we are co-sponsoring an event with the Vietnamese American Arts & Letters Association for author Andrew Lam. He will be reading from and answering questions about his new book, Birds of Paradise Lost. There is no charge for this event.

The 13 stories in Birds of Paradise Lost shimmer with humor and pathos as they chronicle the anguish and joy and bravery of America's newest Americans, the troubled lives of those who fled Vietnam and remade themselves in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The past -- memories of war and its aftermath, of murder, arrest, re-education camps and new economic zones, of escape and shipwreck and atrocity -- is ever-present in these wise and compassionate stories. It plays itself out in surprising ways in the lives of people who thought they had moved beyond the nightmares of war and exodus. It comes back on TV in the form of a confession from a cannibal; it enters the Vietnamese restaurant as a Vietnam vet with a shameful secret; it articulates itself in the peculiar tics of a man with Tourette's Syndrome who struggles to deal with a profound tragedy.

Birds of Paradise Lost is an emotional tour de force, intricately rendering the false starts and revelations in the struggle for integration, and in so doing, the human heart.

Andrew Lam is the featured speaker at this year's UC Irvine School of Humanities commencement ceremony. He is also the author of Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora, which won the 2006 PEN Open Book Award, and East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres. Lam is an editor and cofounder of New American Media, an association of over two thousand ethnic media outlets in America. He was a regular commentator on NPR's All Things Considered for many years, and was the subject of a 2004 PBS documentary called My Journey Home. His essays have appeared in newspapers and magazines such as New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Baltimore Sun, Atlanta Journal, Chicago Tribune, Mother Jones, and The Nation, among many others. His short stories have been widely taught and anthologized. Birds of Paradise Lost is his first story collection. He lives in San Francisco.


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